She reacted. Froze. She struggled to regulate the quickening of her pulse and breathing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You mean you don’t know he killed people for the mob?”
“No,” Beatrice lied. She wasn’t sure if these people were just fishing for information. “All I know is he did what he had to do.”
“Vague. Was that his answer to you? Did he give you specifics of what he had to do as Dmitry Yerzov?”
Beatrice didn’t respond.
“Did you know he was called the Angel of Death?”
No she didn’t, but she was sure she was about to find out.
“No answer?” This time the laughter was smug. “He didn’t tell you, did he?”
Beatrice braced and held her breath.
“He killed children, Ms. Porter. First born sons.”
She realized too late she was shaking her head. “No,” she whispered.
“He probably told you everyone he killed was guilty,” the voice continued. “That’s what enforcers of the mob say, Ms. Porter. That’s how they justify the kill. Anyone who’s in the mafia is a made man, guilty by virtue of association. It doesn’t matter whether you’re sixty years old or six, you’re fair target.”
She couldn’t control the single sob that escaped her. Her lips were trembling, so she bit down to steady it. No! Gabe swore. Even if most of her senses were numb, the rending of her heart delivered a stabbing pain. How could she accept that the man she loved killed children? How would that be acceptable?
He was protecting a cover.
It didn’t make it right.
Don’t jump to conclusions.
What if he couldn’t deny it?
Ask Gabe. Trust him.
At that moment, Beatrice felt fear. Not fear for an imminent death, but fear that she would die with these conflicted emotions about the man she loved.
As her turmoil continued, she almost didn’t notice the voice was speaking to her once more.
“. . . so you had no idea, poor Beatrice.”
The inflection on her name made her ears prick up. It sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
The first man came back on. “This presents such a wonderful opportunity. You do realize that Gabriel Sullivan acted with full orders from your father. That the killing of those children was sanctioned by the admiral.”
“You’re lying about Gabe and my father,” Beatrice lifted her head and stared at the mirror defiantly.
“Ask them.”
“How can I when you’ve abducted me?” she retorted.
Diabolical laughter echoed around her. She was feeling dizzy and the room spun.
“We’ll return you to your father, but we’ll have a little fun with you first.”
“Wh . . . What?”
“Do you know how Dmitry Yerzov sent his messages to Zorin’s enemies?”
This time her fear had morphed into something else. Terror.
After the last threat, someone in a ski mask came in and gave her water, but not food. She couldn’t eat anyway for her stomach was tied up in knots. They let her use the restroom, but marched her right back to the chair and secured her once more. This time they blindfolded her.
They kept her guessing a few hours more. Maybe it was another whole day. She had lost concept of time.
Footsteps came up to the door. It opened. Her ears picked up maybe three men shuffling into the room.
Something was dragged into the center of the room, probably the table she spotted in the corner earlier. Her chair was suddenly shoved forward and the edge of the table hit her rib cage. She didn’t react or say anything.
Her hands were untied and her arms were pulled forward across the table, and held down firmly.
No!
Panic seized her for she knew what was about to happen. Images of Kelly Winters’s brutalized body flashed through her mind.
She attempted to fight, yank her hands away, but they were slammed painfully down on the table when she tried.
“The more you fight, the more it’s going to hurt,” a voice said by her ear.
“You sadistic bastards . . .” she whispered hoarsely.
“Just sending a message.”
The pain hit her and she screamed. Unrelenting agony tore through her flesh. Her arms burned with each slice. After a while, all the pain faded, but someone was still screaming.
*****
“Gabe, help me.” Beatrice reached out to him in the darkness.
She was suspended in the air, wearing some kind of white garment.
He ran toward her, but never got closer.
Blood started from her hairline, streaming down her face.
Soon, it drenched her body and soaked her clothes.
“Gabe!” she screamed as she was swallowed into the darkness.
“Beatrice!” Gabe shouted, jackknifing into a sitting position. A nightmare, thank fuck. He buried his face in his hands. They were shaking.
Rhino whimpered beside him.
“I’m okay, boy,” Gabe whispered, leaning down and petting his head. He had brought Rhino home today, settling him in a dog bed pulled close to the couch where he lay.
But Gabe wasn’t okay. Beatrice had been missing for over 24 hours and there were no demands from anyone and every lead they’d taken was a dead end. Was she even still alive?
Stay alive, Beatrice. Please.
Don’t give up.
I’ll find you.
Gabe swung his feet to the floor and picked up the laptop from the coffee table. Leaning against the couch, he checked his emails again, but there was nothing from Nate or Travis. Gabe was also able to get in touch with the Iron Skulls, but they had nothing for him either.
There was a rap on the door. Despite being injured, Rhino growled. It was 1:00 a.m. Gabe grabbed his 9mm from the table and walked stealthily to the door. He peeked behind the blinds and saw a familiar shape.
Relief or rage, he didn’t know what he felt as he disabled the alarms and opened the door to his early morning visitor.
Benjamin Porter.
CHAPTER TWELVE
They locked gazes at the door.
Gabe didn’t know whether to punch the admiral or to hug him in relief. The older man looked weary, like he had been traveling for weeks. He had never seen the admiral this disheveled.
“May I come in, Sullivan?”
Because Gabe didn’t know what to say, he simply stepped aside to let the admiral enter the house. Porter removed his coat and hung it on the coat stand near the foyer table.
The admiral faced him. “Beatrice?”
“Nothing.”
Porter’s shoulders slumped. He walked further into the house and noticed Rhino. “What happened?”
“Whoever took Beatrice, shot him,” Gabe pushed through his teeth. Rage was consuming him. Porter looking so calm when his daughter was missing didn’t sit well with him. She could be fucking dead, for Christ’s sake. And Beatrice thought he was like her father? This was proof to himself that he was nothing like Porter, because Gabe was barely hanging on to his shit right now. “He protected her.”
“Where were you, Gabe?” Porter asked.
“You son of a bitch,” Gabe snarled viciously. He itched to slug Porter across the face. “I should be asking you, Ben. Where the fuck were you?”
“We’ll come to that soon,” Porter replied. “I didn’t mean the way it sounded.” The admiral rubbed his fingers across his forehead. “Best you tell me what happened.” It took less than five minutes to get through all the info Gabe had. It sickened him that he had so little to go on.
“I’m very close to finding out the mastermind of operation Red Bridge,” Porter said.
“Red Bridge?”
“Red Bridge is a series of interconnected ops starting with the destruction of Project Infinity, the downfall of the Zorin Bratva, and the possible manipulation of the Russian conflict in Ukraine.”
“Are we still talking about weapons?
Arms dealing?”
“Yes. There were two major players—Komarov and Zorin. You infiltrated Zorin, and Project Infinity agents went undercover with Komarov. My counterpart handling the Komarov side got assassinated. I suspected his boss was the culprit. This was a few weeks before John Cooper and Sarah Blake died in the car accident. Red Bridge had become operational. CIA was cut off from Komarov, so whoever was the mastermind of Red Bridge received most of its profits from weapons sales to South America. He was also receiving a cut from Zorin, which is why I think you may have met him and is his motivation to get rid of you, because of the possibility that you could ID him.”
The admiral paused, waiting for some acknowledgment from Gabe. “Go on.”
“Zorin made an enemy with our Red Bridge suspect when he decided to go into the black market nuke business without Red Bridge.”
Things began to click into place. This was around the time John Cooper, who was then known as Jase Locke, met with Gabe at the behest of the admiral. “Had you always known that Travis’s wife was alive?”
“No. I only had my suspicions.”
“You never told me how you got in contact with Jase Locke,” Gabe asked.
“He contacted me through a common operative. He never mentioned Caitlin, only that he may have the location of the missing nuclear material.”
This started a series of meetings between Gabe and Locke. The last time was when Locke handed him a letter for Caitlin. Probably the same meeting where Caitlin had seen him.
“So what’s this got to do with Ukraine?” The region had been in turmoil since the revolution that ousted their president. The interim Ukrainian government was at odds with Russia ever since Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, but there was fear in the International community that this was just the beginning of a more nefarious goal.
“You know the rumors that Russia is supplying arms to the rebels?” Porter asked.
“That’s not even a rumor, is it?” Gabe snorted. “Rumor is Russia is about to invade Ukraine.”
Porter nodded. “There’s reason to believe they’re going to use unconventional weapons to suppress the Ukrainian army.”
“You’re not talking about chemical weapons, are you?” Gabe asked. It had been done recently by the Syrian government. “They’ll be shunned, even by their allies.”
“No. I’m talking about—”
Rhino started growling softly.
The admiral stiffened in front of him, their eyes meeting in unspoken comprehension.
Someone was at the door.
Gabe drew his 9mm once more, but before he reached the window, he heard a door slam and a car pull away. He peeked outside and saw nothing. Usually the light from the street lamps would illuminate a silhouette at his door. His eyes drifted further and his throat caught. There was a big lump sprawled across his front walkway.
A body?
No. No. No.
He threw open the door, ignoring the admiral’s shout of caution.
“Fuck me. Fuck me,” Gabe muttered hoarsely as he ran toward the unknown mass and sank to his knees. A body was wrapped in a blanket, nothing exposed except strands of long hair. It seemed like forever before he could bring himself to peel away the blanket. What would it reveal? Gabe had never been more terrified in his entire life.
“Babe . . .” his voice broke.
“Don’t!” An arm banded around his chest and pulled him back.
“What the fuck, Ben?” he growled with half a mind to knock the admiral on his ass.
“Not chemical weapons, Gabe,” the admiral whispered harshly in his ear. “Bioweapons. A virus. Check if the body has a fever.”
His blood chilled. Gabe wrenched free of the admiral and immediately crawled to the mass on the walkway. This time he didn’t hesitate to pull back the blanket. The lighting cast a ghostly glow over Beatrice’s features; her lips were pale. Her skin was cold, but that wasn’t the reassurance he sought. His hands circled her throat, fingers searching for a pulse. When he found a strong beat, Gabe fell back on his ass, an overwhelming relief momentarily robbing him of strength. He shifted to his knees and uncloaked her body further. He felt for injuries that might discourage lifting her. Finding none, and ignoring the wetness he’d felt along her arms, he carried her back into the house.
“Remove the laptop from the couch,” Gabe ordered the admiral. There was blood all over the blanket. Laying Beatrice carefully across the furniture, the blanket fell open. She was wearing sweats and blood soaked the sleeves of her hoodie.
With grim resolve, Gabe unzipped her top and gently eased her arms out from it. Even if he expected it, he inhaled sharply at the ugly letters carved into her forearms. Oko za oko.
The admiral cursed behind him.
“How, Ben?” Gabe asked tonelessly. “Ryker is dead.”
No answer.
Gabe rose from his crouch, turned on Porter, and without a second thought, he punched the admiral right across the jaw. Not giving the older man a chance to recover, Gabe slammed him against the wall.
Bringing his face close, he said, “That’s for calling your daughter a body to check for fever. Jesus, Ben, you think I’d care to go look for a bio-suit and let Beatrice freeze to death outside? You can quarantine us both because no way in hell am I getting separated from her.”
“You done?” The admiral’s eyes were unflinching.
“You’re unbelievable.” Gabe released him and went back to the unconscious Beatrice. “I need to take her to the hospital, have her checked out.”
“No hospital. She could be infected. We cannot risk it.”
“So you’d risk your daughter instead?”
“You think this is easy for me, Commander?” Porter took out his phone.
“No. I think for once in your life, you should think like a father and not like a damned robot,” Gabe snapped in disgust as he crouched down again. He stroked Beatrice’s cheek gently, willing his anger at Porter to subside because losing his shit right now was not going to help his woman. He considered the admiral’s reluctance to take Beatrice to the hospital and mulled his options. Gabe wouldn’t be satisfied until she was thoroughly looked over by a physician. His gaze drifted over her body, grimacing at the cuts, yet wondering if something far worse had happened. Did they . . . he couldn’t form the words.
“I’ve contacted Dr. Ryan. She’ll be bringing in a special medical van equipped with a biological containment chamber. I don’t think any of us are infected. The virus doesn’t appear to be airborne but more the type to be transferred via bodily fluids.” Porter looked at him. “Did you get blood on you?”
Yes. He did.
“You better fill me in on what’s going on with this fucking virus,” Gabe muttered.
“Believe me, I will.”
*****
Beatrice was taken to a facility in the same building that housed the NEST. All equipment was mobile, brought in by a small commercial truck. The admiral and Gabe were told to wait in a separate room while Dr. Fern Ryan examined Beatrice. For precautionary measures, both of them were sequestered and subjected to a high-pressured hose down and given scrubs to wear afterward. Rhino was taken in by one of Dr. Ryan’s assistants while Gabe’s house was being decontaminated. It seemed overkill to Gabe at first, until he found out what type of virus they were dealing with.
From what Porter had told him so far, the ST-Vyl virus originated from an indigenous bat in Colombia. It was a largely dormant virus, but a geneticist who worked for the CIA, the same scientist who created the Berserker serum, was able to alter the virus’s DNA to make it as lethal as the widely feared Ebola virus. Porter had spent weeks in the Colombian jungles tracking down the lab that was manufacturing the pathogen.
“So you haven’t located the lab?” Gabe asked.
“Not the current one,” Porter said. “But we’ve found two previous locations.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“We found mass graves. They burned the bodies, but we were st
ill able to type the virus.”
“Jesus Christ! They tested on humans?”
Porter nodded. “Colombia was the perfect location. It had the virus host, jungles where they could hide the labs, and test subjects that could be used and passed off as victims of the armed conflict or drug trafficking vendettas.”
“Shouldn’t Senator Mendoza be made aware of this?”
The admiral exhaled deeply. “This op is classified. I’m already breaking protocol by telling you.”
“Do we know how Red Bridge is going to get it to the Russians?”
“I don’t think a deal has been made yet,” Porter said. “But the virus has reached the U.S.”
“How?”
Before Porter could answer, Dr. Ryan stepped into the room.
“How is she?” Gabe asked anxiously.
“We immediately tested for the ST-Vyl strain, it came back negative,” the doctor said. “She’s dehydrated. Her tox screen hasn’t come back yet, but I suspect they’ve given her drugs to keep her unconscious. X-rays and CT scan show no internal injuries. The rape kit came back negative. Beatrice mentioned as much. They cut her,” Dr. Ryan’s lips thinned in anger, “but did nothing else.”
“She’s awake?” Porter asked.
Gabe needed to see her, to look into her eyes to see for certain that she was okay. He didn’t spend enough time with her before she was taken to this facility. The 24 hours he spent thinking he would never see her again made him overly paranoid of losing sight of her. Beatrice might just lose her mind with his hovering, but at this moment, Gabe didn’t give a fuck. She could be pissed at him and hate him, but as long as she was alive and breathing he could live with it.
*****
It was some kind of safe house, or so Beatrice was told. Rhino was asleep in the backseat of Gabe’s Silverado. She was feeling oddly apathetic. Dr. Ryan said her body and psyche had suffered too much and the shock shut down her mind. Her system hadn’t fully expelled the drug cocktail they had given her, which would explain her whacked out sense of self.
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